


Love Is A Smoke

by J_Baillier



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Heavy Angst, I am keeping both the warnings and the tags scarce deliberately, I recommend you skip this one, M/M, Romance, so if you're not up to handling anything and everything I might throw at you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23493166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_Baillier/pseuds/J_Baillier
Summary: It's spring in 2036. John and Sherlock are no longer together. Sherlock attempts to cope — or doesn't.
Relationships: Mycroft Holmes & John Watson, Sherlock Holmes & Greg Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 124
Kudos: 247





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [[an index and guide to all my Sherlock stories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25011148)]
> 
> I've kept the tags and warnings scarce deliberately. If you're not up to handling anything and everything I might throw at you, I recommend you skip this story. The Jball ain't gonna be pulling any punches in this one.

> What is it else? A madness most discreet,  
> A choking gall and a preserving sweet.   
> ― William Shakespeare: _Romeo and Juliet_

**— London, The United Republic of England and Wales, March 12th 2036—**

The skin remembers. It remembers the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the gentle caresses and the strikes of pain. It holds onto those memories and echoes back those touches years, decades later. That's what people said, and like most things that people said, Sherlock had dismissed it as the poppycock of lesser minds.

What they hadn't spoken of was how those memories could strike like a sucker punch, slithering in when he was doing his damnedest to distract himself, to forget, to become numb.

Those memories always made him feel detached, like he wasn't quite where his corporeal self resided in those moments. Like he couldn't quite hold on to his own timeline. Like there was still hope. A chance that things could have been different.

 _Fingertips_. John's fingertips when he held out Sherlock's phone and Sherlock took it from him. Slightly coarse fingertips trailing on his finger joints until they met the violin calluses on his own much longer digits.

 _Skin to skin_. 'God, you mad bastard with your bloody violinist hands, Jesus _fuck_ Sherlock, do that again and I'll––'

John's threats had always sounded so eerily similar to his endearments.

"John, can you give me my––" he says without thinking. No, that's not accurate. He is thinking, but his thoughts are not on this crime scene, not in the present.

When his perception readjusts to the much bleaker reality, three pairs of eyes are on him. Two avert, quickly. Lestrade is the only one who meets Sherlock's gaze. _Sorry_ , the DI mouths, and Sherlock wants to slap him.

Donovan and that new detective, Norton, had talked about him yesterday when they thought he wasn't within earshot. 'He's still pining after––?' Norton had started, but Donovan's eyes had flashed with something hard to interpret, and she'd snapped, 'Isn't it obvious that he is?'

The angry protectiveness in her voice was new, but Sherlock had no mind to try to analyse it. To be the target of pity from Sally Donovan, of all people, was hardly an accomplishment.

Isn't it enough that he remembers, all the time? Must he carry those memories on the very shape of himself for all to see?

The absence of John is written in the hunch of his shoulders, in the grey tint of his skin, in the darkness in his eyes.

John isn't with him anymore. He's not with John. They're not together anymore. To everyone Sherlock works with, he's now defined by what he lacks. Once, John had complained that everything he was, everything people saw when they looked at him, was connected to Sherlock.

 _I guess this is payback_.

He grits his teeth as memories of _that_ argument return. They'd argued before, of course, the sort of bickering every couple perpetrates. And, there had been the time after he died and then after Mary died when John wouldn't speak to him.

Still, _that_ argument, he suspects, had been the final nail in the coffin. The final push for John to go.

"The blunt force trauma is a red herring," he tells Lestrade. "Make sure forensics run a full tox screen and tell Molly to find an injection site."

His phone rings, and he flinches. Moves not a muscle to retrieve the phone. Nobody calls him except Lestrade and Mycroft.

And.

"Have you been taking his calls?" Lestrade asks.

He shakes his head. Things have not been easy between the DI and him since it turned out Mycroft had been talking to the man, trying to get Sherlock to do precisely that: to answer when his phone rings and the caller ID says _John Watson_.

He should turn his phone on silent, tell people to text.


	2. Chapter 2

> I have a soul of lead  
>  So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.  
>  ― William Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_

"Are you still angry with him for taking that assignment?"

"Do you still blame yourself for it?"

"We don't always do things to spite others, Sherlock. John would be the first to tell you he had a life before you, during which he made quite similar life choices.

His sessions with Ella consist mostly of her monologue, consisting of questions he knows he should answer because this is _therapy_ , but he can't quite see the point of picking on those scabs. It won't change anything.

"Have you been taking his calls?"

"No."

"Many people find it useful to talk, to find closure."

"It's not going to be closure, is it."

"Your brother helped your husband make sure you had a support system if you needed it," Ella says. "What's the harm in accepting that help?"

"It's not real. John is gone. That's all there is to it."

"Have you talked to you brother at least?" Ella asks, predictably. Her expression doesn't seem to hold much hope that this week's answer will be different.

Why is it that he continues to see John's therapist? Sherlock wonders suddenly. Does he think she has answers which not even this new version of John he hates, the one who keeps calling him, has been able to provide?

"No, and I never will."

"You continue to blame him for John's decisions?"

He needs someone to blame besides just himself. He knows this. He hopes the bruises around his brother's neck from his fingertips will somehow leave permanent marks. That the people Mycroft works with would finally see behind the facade and realise the lengths to which he's willing to go to use people as his pawns.

He knows he's being unfair. Unkind. Most of all to himself.

 _John left because he wanted to_ , he tries on for size. He then wants to shrug off the thought like a coat in the fitting room of a shop. _This one's not right, I'll try another_.

_______________

  
The phone rings at midnight. Sherlock wonders if it's Ella's doing that it would happen at such a strange hour. _They're all in on it._

He almost answers.

____________

"I can't just be your bloody sidekick for the rest of my life!" John had snapped before Sherlock had even voiced his disapproval the day John had met with Mycroft about the Syria assignment.

"You're not," Sherlock had argued feebly, "but this is… I should be the one going. This is MI6 work; hardly something you have the skills for."

"Mycroft is right in that you're too high profile, and you wouldn't have the faintest how to act around soldiers. _Fellow_ soldiers. If anything, you'd be likely to swoon."

He'd huffed indignantly. "Mycroft is an idiot."

"That may be, but when has he ever _overestimated_ me?"

Mycroft doesn't overestimate anybody. His default is to assume nobody else besides him is competent even in tying their own shoelaces. John could do this, and Sherlock knew it. But it didn't mean he was willing to let John go.

"So you get to traipse around the world for two years without giving a toss about me, but Lord forbid I want to take off for two weeks?"

Those two weeks had stretched to two months. Then an eternity.

He still doesn't know what he should have — could have — said to convince John not to take the assignment. Mycroft's reasons for offering it were obvious: a physician and a military officer was precisely what was required.

Sherlock didn't care if the case got solved. All he cared about was not letting go of something he felt like he'd spent three lifetimes losing over and over again.

Now, he curls his toes which have gone white and cold on the draughty floor. He had opened the window… when? Have hours bled into days again? It's dark, now, and the cup of tea Mrs Hudson had placed beside him on the floor has gone cold.


	3. Chapter 3

> Can I go forward when my heart is here?  
>  ― William Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_

He answers on an angry whim on a Tuesday when he's just solved a case that had been at least a nine and he feels more like himself than he had in a long time and he's even eating takeout.

_Look, John, I'm sorting myself out._

The cold, sharp triumph of the case brings forth a desire to flaunt his prowess, his command of his existence and his intellect at everyone. Including John.

He answers when the phone rings, gritting his teeth when the painful jolt of hearing John's voice hits. It sends him into tachycardia like the sudden shock of being submerged in glacial water.

 _Deep water, Sherlock, all your life_.

One of these days, if he's not careful in picking up only when he's in the right shape to endure these calls, the pain of them will probably burst an artery in his head. It would be poetic, wouldn't it? _I always knew you'd be the death of me, John_.

"You're like one of those automated phone salesmen, you know. You never let up," he declares venomously, waving his chopsticks at the darkness in the corners of the kitchen.

"You're not using, are you?" John's voice asks him at the other end of the line. That voice sounds much less concerned than its chosen words should signal.

"Is that what Mycroft thought would be a good opening gambit? Dull." He almost says John's name, but he'd vowed not to use it again. This isn't _his_ John. Not anymore.

"Mycroft doesn't get to put words in my mouth. How are you, Sherlock?"

The softness almost breaks him. Almost. He sticks the chopstick up in his bowl of Pad Thai. The Japanese never stick their chopsticks in food like that, because that's how one serves food to the dead. "Still here. That's all there is to it. I continue to exist. That should please you, tick some of your boxes."

"I'm here for you, and you only. I'm here because Mycroft and I felt you should have something to fall back on if I couldn't be with you anymore.”

" _Fall back on_? All I have is your voice. Much good that would be if I really was to take some proverbial _fall_. All that this _safety net_ would do is let me crash through and hit my proverbial head on the floor."

"You can talk to me, Sherlock. It might help."

"Might as well be talking to myself." There's the bitter, salty nectar of tears tickling the back of his throat again, and he swallows it like a pill. He hates it, how easily John can do this to him when he's not even really _here_.

"How did you––" He starts, then catches himself.

"Sherlock?"

_Don't say my name. Don't you dare._

"How did you… when I–– when you thought I was gone–– surely, you've some asinine advice to depart? Why else would you have done this?"

"Just don't think it should be any easier than it is. That there's some measure of how to cope, how to behave, when to start dragging yourself back to some sort of a life. Don't push people away, though. That's not good. Let them look after you."

Sherlock has no idea what he'd been expecting. Perhaps something more encouraging.

"You left me. Maybe you don't get to impart any advice."

"At least I've been where you are, now."

"How much help do you think an AI of _me_ would have been after Barts and before Mary?"

It turns out that the AI of the late John Watson has no answer to this.

___________

"When should I stop using the system? How do I know it's done what it's supposed to?" He demands of Ella.

"There can be many purposes to it, and I guess it's for you to decide what you want out of it."

"I never wanted it in the first place. John, the idiot, thought I'd find some sort of solace from a computer-generated approximation of him. It's nothing more than a spruced-up version of voicemail."

_An answering service that talks back at you. And sounds exactly like your dead husband._

"Do I stop using it, stop answering those damned calls when it stops hurting––" _which will never_ _happen_ "—or when it hurts so much I can't take it anymore?"

"Perhaps, rather than about pain, it's about need."

 _I won't ever stop needing him_.

"Every time we meet, you complain about the system. Yet, despite knowing how easy it is to stop, to disengage from it, you've not done so. Perhaps a part of you does see it as a means to say goodbye?"

"I haven't deleted any photos or videos I've got of John on my computer, either."

"If nothing else, those calls can be a way to express your anger."

"I don't want to be angry with him. He'd probably tell me it's justified."

"Because he was angry at you after you faked your suicide?" It's not often Ella is so blunt. "Life is not quid pro quo, Sherlock. Instead of demanding to know other people's expectations about how you should grieve for John, look inward, and tell yourself what it is you need or don't need. What it is you want to tell him, and how."

___________

There is a number he can call. That number will not connect him to the posthumous voice of John, but to those maintaining his artificial presence in Sherlock's life.

The off switch — the _killswitch_ — is just one word. If it's so easy, why hasn't he already used it? 

_It's not John. It's not._

Perhaps Ella is right and a part of him had still clung on to that artificial construct. He'd complained about it because he'd detested wanting it to exist.

"Unsubscribe," he says, the word wrenching itself out of his lungs as though there is a frantic animal in his chest tearing out flesh. It slips out of his mouth with a shuddering sob.

It is the unlikeliest, the most banal, the most useless, the most unsentimental last word he could have ever chosen to speak to John. An anti-climax, a blasphemous slur in its idiocy.

He can't leave things like that, can he?


	4. Chapter 4

> I must be gone and live, or stay and die.  
>  ― William Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_

None of those words on the phone had been real. Ever. They were an approximation created by an algorithm, much of the sentiment probably added in the post-production machinery of Sherlock's limbic system.

There were no last words between them, because shouldn't the definition of such things be that you knew that is what you were speaking? That you knew you were never going to see each other again.

 _To the best of times_.

 _You may need to restart my heart_.

That's what John had done. So many times.

_I heard you._

"I heard you," he whispers. "I wish you could do the same. One more miracle, John, _please_ , just this once." His smile is a rictus, his humour always ill-timed and grotesque in hindsight.

He waits. There is no answer, and somehow, it's less frightening than those phone calls.

He'd made it through the funeral with the help of cocaine and heroin. Well, made it through the service by standing in the churchyard smoking an entire packet of Marlboro pilfered from the vicar.

He had nothing to do with the arrangements. Nothing to do with anything. He didn't want to participate in John's death; John's life was all he'd cared about. Mycroft had organised the whole thing, just like he'd organised Rosie's adoption papers twelve years earlier, through which the custody of John's daughter had shifted to Molly.

John had drank for a week after managing to admit, out loud, that she'd spend more time at Molly’s house than Baker Street after John had sold his and Mary's flat. There were cases, there were… just so many things. There was Sherlock.

Oddly enough, it had never occurred to Sherlock that he should have felt guilty that John had finally chosen him over everything else, chosen him over his own child. He'd died twice for the man, wasn't he owed something in return?

Petty. Selfish. _I may be on the side of the angels, but I am not one of them._

His brother had looked like the angel of death, really, in his black suit standing at the edge of the grave staring down at Sherlock, curled up on top of the casket after the proceedings were over. His hands were cold, his back erupting in cold sweat under his coat and the smell of wet, decaying earth was nauseating, but the hard, wooden surface felt more comfortable than the bed he would now sleep in alone at Baker Street.

At least this time, Mycroft had no dry, witty retorts to share as he knelt by the grave and offered his arm. Sherlock moved not a muscle to sit up and tucked his hand under his cheek instead, closing his eyes.

Soon, he could tell two other figures had appeared by Mycroft from the way the sunlight filtered by his eyelids shifted and dimmed.

Ten minutes later — it appeared Mycroft had decided this was a socially acceptable time for lying on top of someone's casket in an open grave — Sherlock was unceremoniously hauled out by two burly MI5 agents and taken to the dullest country house in England for four weeks of detox.

On the twenty-ninth day of John lying in the ground, Lestrade stood at the front entrance to take him to work.

That's what he did, then, just as he'd done before John. Sometimes, he could imagine it had all been a bad dream, until he found some toy of Rosie's underneath a piece of furniture or a sock in the sock drawer that wasn't his own.

At nights, he could do nothing _but_ remember.

"John," he starts, stammering a little.

He kneels down on the ground beside the gravestone. It takes him longer than it should to recall whether there had been talk of cremation versus burial. No. Harry had said something… There had been a lot people had said in those days, and he'd heard none of it.

 _John Hamish Watson. Loving partner and beloved brother._ The dates have no relevance, because time had become relative after John was gone.

They were never married. It wasn't for them. After John's disastrous first marriage he had no taste for it. Mycroft had once brought it up over tea, this unholy state of the two of them, and used taxes as a reasoning for tying the knot. Sherlock had given him no more biscuits and chased him out. He didn't need rings or ceremonies. Not with John. Not ever. They didn't need rituals or monuments. They had all they needed in the existence of the other.

 _Graves are ridiculous._ Nothing but biological, decaying matter. Rotting effigies for the living. Superstition.

"Look what you've made me. A _commoner_ ," he says. "Someone who goes to graveyards, now. Wouldn't do it for anybody else. Lots of things I wouldn't have done for anyone else."

'I know', he imagines John saying, and instantly feels guilty about it. It's wrong, putting words into the mouths of the dead. Did John know? Did he _really_?

They had spoken of Sherlock’s time away, taking Moriarty down, but those conversations were always business-like, dismissive, apart from the one when John had discovered his scars. That was the first night they'd shared a bed. That discovery had rather put a damper on the sex; John had demanded a conversation, instead. Sherlock still remembered viscerally well the anger which had suddenly rising in his gut. John had had years to initiate that conversation with him, all those years of Mary and Rosie and disaster and loss. He'd never asked, not until he was brave enough to make love to Sherlock.

John would probably tell him to stop meditating on sex while sat in a graveyard. _It's probably indecent or something_. Not that either of them ever cared about such things.

"I loved you. I love you," he tells the gravestone.

That love would never expire, never cease just because of death. The only thing that could have turned it into past tense is if he'd stopped loving John and that was not a possibility. He'd mistreated that love many times, dismissed it, hid it with shame, pushed it away, excused terrible things with it. But it stubbornly existed, nearly burnt his heart out.

He'd never needed Moriarty for it, and the bastard knew it. He'd jumped off the roof instead of being pushed.

Why hadn't he understood that he could talk to John like this? That he doesn't need a ghostly voice on the phone, the proverbial shallow grave of self-destruction, or anybody's permission? John is in his head and in his heart and in the memories of his skin. He doesn't need a computer algorithm to tell him what John would have thought or said. Not even the world's best microchip could approximate what it felt like to trail his hand down John's stomach or to fall asleep in his arms. All that belonged — still belongs — to him, all of it stored on his own hard drive. All of it, safely preserved in his Mind Palace.

The stone is surprisingly warm under his fingertips, sunlit underneath a willow tree, and his skin remembers the rest.

**——————— The End ———————**

> Those who are dead, are not dead   
>  They're just living in my head   
>  And since I fell for that spell   
>  I am living there as well _  
> _ — Coldplay: _42_
> 
> Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.  
>  ― William Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this was borrowed from season three of Westworld, although similar concepts have been featured elsewhere. Kudos to Aaron Paul for his stellar work in those episodes.
> 
> I am a supporter of diligent tagging, but in this instance, anything too informative would have wrecked the twist.
> 
> Betaed by Elldotsee who does so enjoy it when I hang, draw and quarter her heart.


End file.
